Why you need to watch Patrick Melrose this Sunday

Clear your diaries – this Sunday, the first episode of Sky Atlantic’s Patrick Melrose, the five-part television drama based on the acclaimed semi-autobiographical novels by Edward St Aubyn, is airing and we couldn’t be more excited. It stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the aristocratic Melrose, a self-confessed ‘narcissistic, schizoid, suicidal alcoholic’, alongside a similar starry cast: Jennifer Jason Leigh plays his mother, Eleanor, while Hugo Weaving takes on the role of his brilliantly awful father, David. Girls star Allison Williams, Holliday Grainger and Blythe Danner also have roles.

Adapted by One Day writer David Nicholls, each episode of the drama will be devoted to one of the five Patrick Melrose novels, following the protagonist’s childhood in a highly dysfunctional upper-class English family before moving on to his adult substance abuse and, ultimately, recovery, taking in the South of France in the Sixties, New York in the Eighties and Britain in the early Noughties. It’s subversive and savage, but above all funny. As Melrose’s father says, ‘Education should be something of which a child can later say, “If I survived that, I can survive anything.”’

The first episode of Patrick Melrose will air on Sky Atlantic on Sunday 13 May at 9pm